Paint Stripping

Customer Safety – this includes not only the safety of the customer but everything from the family cat to vegetable gardens

Simply put, paint stripping is the process of removing paint from a surface.

Dave Rowe Painter & Decorator uses a range of products and techniques to remove paint based on the age, condition, surface and existing product.

For some materials – timber weatherboards, for example – there are many methods that can be used to remove existing paint, from a hot air gun, chemical strippers, machine sanding, hand scraping and sanding, to more expensive systems that involve carbide blades set in a spinning drum or even infra-red heat.

There are some materials that paint cannot be easily removed from, including plasterboard and fibrous plster, softboard, particleboard, thin timber veneers and fibre-cement or textured exterior coatings.

Apart from knowing the material that you are removing the paint from, it also helps to know in advance what type of paint you are removing – water-based or solvent-based – because not all techniques work well with each paint type.

The use of white lead was banned in 1979, but red lead can still be found in a few special-purpose paints that often have a distinctive red colour.

Care needs to be taken when removing old lead paint as part of preparations for new painting. When lead is taken into the body (swallowed or breathed in as dust) it can cause potentially serious illness.

Once all the above has been determined we will use one, or a combination of the following: